


A Quiet Night

by DerGhostiest



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Comfort, Drinking, Fluff, M/M, No Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 02:52:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19803223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DerGhostiest/pseuds/DerGhostiest
Summary: A quiet night off from the chaos of Gotham, a couple glasses of wine, and a very anxious Jonathan. A very quick, fluffy one-shot about the importance of listening to each other.





	A Quiet Night

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in an AU where Jon and Ed are both closer in age and heroes rather than villains. None of that really comes up in the story but may help to make some of the smaller details make sense.

“I need another glass, so you’re getting one too.”

“Oh, dear. One moment.” Jon drained the last of the Pinot Noir from the his glass, swallowing the rich, red wine without a single pause to savor the flavor, as he had done with every other sip. He lifted the empty cup to Ed with a smile. Ed nipped it from between his fingers with the grace of a pickpocket, and Jon settled into the old, musty couch, letting both the cloth and the gentle haze of the alcohol envelope him. It was mid-winter, and the old fireplace - the only thing in Jon’s apartment he actually liked, or, more accurately, had an opinion on - was crackling with firewood kindled with old copies of Arkham paperwork.

Edward and Jon hadn’t had a night without fear or worry or exertion since they had dawned the double identities of the Riddler and the Scarecrow, but on this January night, the cold and snow had formed a most welcome intervention to their crime-fighting obsession. Ed resolved to at least half of a bottle of whiskey, which Jon had negotiated down to a nice bottle of wine, which Ed had artfully persuaded up to two. Jon agreed, so long as he got to choose to movie.

Ed returned from the kitchen with two full glasses of the California wine - which meant Ed had drank and refilled half of his when Jon couldn’t see him - and lightly offered the stem to Jon. Jon’s twiggy fingers wrapped around the base and lifted the glass above the couch, giving Ed room to slip back into the position he had spent the past hour in: his head against Jon’s chest, propped against the arm that wasn’t holding precious alcohol. Their legs wrapped together at the other end of the couch, and all was right with the world.

“Ready to keep going?” Jon asked, arm under Ed reaching out not quite far enough to hit the mouse on the laptop stationed in front of them on coffee table, lifted up to viewing height by a stack of chemistry textbooks.

Ed turned his head to look up at Jon. His eyes were relaxed, his smile light, his nose and cheeks a new shade of pink - Jon hadn’t seen Ed like this in a while. Usually, Ed was all energy and deviousness and shit-eating grins. “Stressed” was a word rarely used to describe the man nestled into his arms right now, but “relaxed,” “calm,” and “quiet” were even less frequent.

Jon looked into his friend’s eyes, and saw something stir gently in them. Ed’s eyes flitted back and forth between Jon’s, his smile broadening only by the smallest amount.

“I think Up can wait a few more minutes,” he mumbled.

Ed raised his head as though he were trying to get a better look, and Jon accommodated by tilting his head to be directly in front of his friend’s.

Without warning, Ed pushed his lips into Jon’s. Not with particular force, but with enough pressure that Jon knew it was deliberate.  
Jon’s heart stopped entirely, then seemed to remember what it was supposed to be doing and put in twice the effort to catch up. He didn’t know if it was the alcohol - well, no, he knew it wasn’t the alcohol, but he would let the alcohol give him permission for this brazen act - but he found his own lips reciprocating. All Jon’s misgivings melted in the warmth and softness of Ed’s lips, diffusing into a haze that muddied every sense but touch and taste.

Ed spun in Jon’s arms, slipping his hands around him, the glass of wine miraculously disappeared to some parallel reality outside of their embrace. The smaller man’s hands pressed into Jon’s back, pulling each deeper into the comfort of the other. Their legs entangled to keep up the pace of their arms; lips to lips, chest to chest, hips to hips, every part of their bodies gripping together as though in vain hope that they might press right through their clothes and against each others’ skin.

It was Ed who first recognized they needn’t wait for quantum probability to work in their favor, and retracted one hand to undo the buttons of his shirt while wrapping the other around the back of Jon’s neck to keep his lips from wandering too far. It was a few seconds before Jon’s brain caught up with the situation, and he twisted awkwardly to utterly fail to reach one arm around Ed and back to his own shirt. Jon twisted the other way, and only too late realized how close the pair was to the edge of the couch, and how Jon’s sedentariness was the anchor that kept them from careening over the edge.

And careen they did, rolling with twin yelps into the coffee table and onto the floor with an impact to which Jon’s downstairs neighbor retaliated with several knocks of a broom. It was then that Jon realized where Ed had placed their wine when he so magically cast them out of sight and mind; two glasses tumbled onto the pair from the coffee table, staining shirts, couch, and carpet a deep purple-red. 

Jon rose to his knees like a man breaking the surface of a lake after nearly drowning. Droplets of wine flew from his hair as he shook his head, and all the haze of passion and alcohol flew with them, bringing reality back into cold, sharp relief. Laundry, he thought with more urgency than he’d thought anything in the past week. Jon was halfway to his feet when something tugged at his collar.

“No,” Ed laughed, holding onto his lapel and smiling rosy-cheeked from where he sat between Jon’s legs. Jon’s face flushed, and that blood must have come from his legs because he was suddenly very weak in the knees. “Don’t go yet.”

Jon gulped, hesitating for what felt like an entire year before his desperate need to have a wardrobe without wine stains overcame his desperate need to fall dreamlike into Edward’s warmth. He gave Ed a sheepish smile, mumbled a truly sincere apology, and tore at the buttons of his shirt while running for the laundry room. He could hear Ed laugh behind him, comforting him that he hadn’t utterly destroyed a profound moment in their relationship.

“Take it off, handsome! Yeah baby, show me that bod!” echoed through the apartment.

\--

Jon wetted a scrap of rag in the sink and pressed it repeatedly against the dark stain in his button-down. He held the fabric taut against the bottom of the basin with his left hand, tugging it out with his right between blots. Recognizing the necessity of more limbs than he had for this maneuver, his eyes shot around the small room for something heavy enough to replace a third arm.

It was then that two more arms slid gently around his waist, and at their touch Jon shot from both shirt and floor by several inches. Laughter echoed in the poor acoustics of the laundry room, Ed pulling back just far enough to avoid Jon’s elbow as he turned.

“God, don’t,” Jon said half-heartedly. He began back to the shirt but a firm hand on his hip stopped him and, after only a moment of resistance, reversed course. Jon found the back of his corduroys pressed against the outer basin of the industrial sink, his hands gripping the lip less out of a need for balance and more out of a need to be touching something that wasn’t Ed.

Ed met his gaze, and Jon fell right into his eyes. He was so taken by the expression of longing staring back at him that Ed’s face was almost touching his before Jon realized they had been getting closer. Jon pulled back with a fit and start, not entirely sure which direction he wanted to go.

Ed took this as a challenge. He pressed his hands against Jon’s hips and thrust his head forward for another go, but Jon’s head had figured out that it did, in fact, not want to touch Ed’s. He jerked back a little further once more, until his body was arced over the sink.

Ed frowned, but did not move in again. It appeared, for once, he had picked up on Jon’s body language. Jon would not realize until later how grateful he was that it was this moment that Ed finally noticed a social cue.

“What’s wrong?”

“I have to clean my shirt.”

“That’s not what’s wrong.”

Jon stared silently at him for a moment, knowing he was entirely right.

“It’s just, I…” Jon sighed and firmly removed Ed’s hands from his hips. His eyes flicked from one of Ed’s to the other, lip curling under his top teeth.

“I don’t know,” he whispered, finally. Jon looked down at his feet. He realized his hands were wringing his belt and chose not to stop them. “I’m nervous.”

“That’s okay,” said Ed softly, and raised his hands to wrap around Jon again; he stopped when Jon shrank further against the sink, and forced his hands into his pockets to stop the temptation that was welling up in his fingers.

“I want to,” Jon said again. He turned his gaze from his feet to somewhere to his right, not caring or seeing precisely what was there; anywhere that wasn’t Ed would do. “I just don’t know. I don’t know.”

“That’s okay.”

“I’m not ready. I want to be, I really want to be-”

“Jon, it’s okay.”

“-but I’m not. I know I’m being a baby and a coward and a wimp and I’m sorry because I know you want this and I want to do it for you and I-”

“Jonathan Jeffrey Crane.” Jon flinched at the sharpness of the words. He glanced sideways at Ed, from whose face all hardness and anger melted away into a soft pool of something between sympathy and bemusement. Jon inhaled slowly and exhaled at a pace that would lose a race to continental drift.

“Take your own advice for once in your goddamn life,” Ed said gently, and red-hot embarrassment loosened the tension gripping Jon’s body. He looked to his feet again, as though words of encouragement were written there. “If this were me, what would you say?”

“That the feelings you feel are real, that although your anxiety may not come from a probable external circumstance you still feel it and it is therefore both valid to consider and worth exploring why you feel it, that fear is a natural human response to the unknown and that you are not a baby for experiencing it, and that your need to set a boundary in a circumstance that makes you uncomfortable - especially in regards to your own body - is a healthy reaction and worth celebration rather than condemnation,” Jon said in a single breath, without looking up from his socks.

“Mhm,” Ed nodded sagely. “And what would Jon, my best friend, say? Instead of Jon, who insists he is not my therapist.”

A strange contortion twisted Jon’s face for a moment, like a load-bearing line had snapped and someone inside Jon’s face had raced to fix it.

“That you’re my best friend and that we won’t go any further than you want to go, and that physical intimacy in a relationship goes as slow as the slower of the people in that relationship needs to, that there is no obligation in a mutually healthy relationship to perform any action that makes you truly uncomfortable especially in rega-”

“Dr. Crane.”

“-that I love you and I don’t want to hurt you so if you say stop, we stop, and that’s all there is to it.”

“That’s right.” Ed smiled. “Now pretend I said all that to you, and also pretend I have two PhDs so that I know what I’m talking about.”

Jon smiled weakly at his socks. There was a pause.

“I’m sorry for pushing you,” Ed said finally. “I’m… I know I’m not good at reading even basic social signals, less so after some wine and the emotional rollercoaster that is Up.”

Jon’s smile strengthened considerably.

“I’m trying to be better.”

“I know,” Jon said, finally looking his friend in the eye. Both noticed the slight redness around the other’s eyes. Neither mentioned it. “I’m sorry I can’t always give a straightforward ‘no.’ I’m working on it, too.”

After the two shared smiles for an unreasonably long moment, Jon’s face turned faux-serious.

“This doesn’t end in us making out again.”

Ed gave an exaggerated groan. 

“Fine, Mister I-Stick-To-My-Stated-Boundaries-Like-A-Healthy-Human-Being.” Ed turned on his heel to faux-storm out of the room. “We’re gonna finish Up, though, so get a new shirt on.”

Ed paused on the other side of the door frame and snuck a coy, smoldering look over his shoulder at Jon. “Or don’t.”

Jon chuckled. For a moment, he considered teasing Ed by going topless for the rest of the night. No, he thought finally. Not during Up. Maybe during The Incredibles.


End file.
